


I'll fight my corner

by etiquettedarling



Category: The Autobiography of Jane Eyre
Genre: F/M, Gen, Likely to be canonballed, but whatever I'm enjoying dysfunctional father daughter relationships indulge me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-10
Packaged: 2018-01-08 05:39:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1128979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etiquettedarling/pseuds/etiquettedarling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Initially Adele doesn't believe that anyone can have the patience to make entire pictures out of little pinprick dots but then she's learning about science and atoms and molecules (re-reading the appropriate entries in Volumes 1 and 10) and it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch. She begins to realise everyone is made up of tiny pinprick dots. Which is why sometimes you can't see all of them.</p>
<p>She thinks her dad might be. He doesn't come home often. All she sees is the flash of a grin, the sparkle of a gift bag, and they're only little dots. She can't see the whole picture yet.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>Coming of a THE THING high, have a story about how it all effects Adele and Rochester's relationship before and following the series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll fight my corner

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when people post half hour videos on youtube don't look at me

When Adele is 7, bored, and wandering around the library, she comes across a thick leather bound dictionary. The title reads "The Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 1" and she's sure she's never seen so many words in one place or if she has, that none of them have been nearly this well organised.

She sits down on the floor of that library and pours over the book for hours. She learns the word Abicinate means "To blind by a red-hot metal plate held before the eyes" and wonders why there needs to be a specific word for that. She learns that "barn' is also a unit of measurement.

Adele falls asleep in that library and she dreams of words words words until the Nanny finds her there and drags her up to bed.

"Did you know a bavian is an insignificant or unskilled poet?" she mutters sleepily as she's tugged forward by the hand. The nanny looks back, raises her eyebrows and seems genuinely interested for a second.

"No I did not know that"

"Well" a yawn is stifled politely by the back of her hand "it's in the _dictionary_ "

...

Adele doesn't make a whole lot of friends at school. They think she's a know it all so then she decides that she is.

Going it know it all that is.

She works her way through the dictionaries in the library, gets to "Pointillism" (Vol. 11) and decides that she's going to read about art when she has the time.

Initially Adele doesn't believe that anyone can have the patience to make entire pictures out of little pinprick dots but then she's learning about science and atoms and molecules (re-reading the appropriate entries in Volumes 1 and 10) and it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch. She begins to realise everyone is made up of tiny pinprick dots. Which is why sometimes you can't see all of them.

She thinks her dad might be. He doesn't come home often. All she sees is the flash of a grin, the sparkle of a gift bag, and they're only little dots. She can't see the whole picture yet.

One day she will though, she's sure of it.

...

There's an elevator in her house that she's never seen open. She thinks to ask Grace about it one day when her father is out of town.

The woman's mouth presses into a tight line as she stares at her phone.

"Ask your father when he gets home"

Adele puts it from her mind and finds a book about opera and music in the library. She loses herself in the sad stories and beautiful costumes. When he does get home she talks about Madame Butterfly and asks about piano lessons instead.

...

Adele knows everyone has a mother. Most of the kids at her school get picked up by Au Pairs, but she knows that they all have moms.

She sees them at piano recitals and the Christmas pageant she’s in when she’s 7. If they’re not there then they’re at home, or on spa trips, or sweeping around parties dripping in diamonds, or with their new family in Denver. Some mothers are buried, or scattered on the wind, some of them don’t get out of bed in the morning, but they’re there. There’s a concrete explanation.

She remembers vaguely being told once that her mother left them but hasn’t been told anything else. Her dad never talks about it when he’s home so instead she tells him facts that she’s learnt while he was gone. She feels a pleased flutter in her chest when he smiles at her, even if he does only listen to her play one concerto on the baby grand he bought her 6 months ago.

...

He tells her about her mother about a week after her 10th birthday. The house has burnt down. Jane isn’t there. A woman with unkempt hair and a wiry frame is dragged from the wreckage screaming and he cries for the entire conversation from his hospital bed. She doesn’t know what to do.

She’s never read a book about how to proceed when you get told your mother’s brain is broken by your father as he sobs and repeats over and over again how sorry he is.

Later, she’ll think about how it doesn’t even sound like he’s talking to her.

...

It's not that Adele dislikes Jane. Actually, if she's being honest, she's the easiest person in their house to talk to.

It's just that Adele remembers being 9 and not seeing her dad for months at a time.

She remembers him coming home for a really long time a few weeks after Jane moved in.

At 9 she couldn't quite figure out the connection between Jane and his long stay at home. Even when they had gotten engaged the first time and she had walked into the kitchen to find them kissing. All her brain had done was spout off a fact about the origins of the kiss as an action (evolving from a fairly gross process called 'kiss feeding') and decided that her dad was pretty gross with Jane before her future step mother had swept down and fixed her a snack.

She remembers a trip to Banff, remembers Jane sprinting from the office in a big white dress. She remembers being told to go to her room.

A few weeks later, when her dad had gone away again and Jane hadn't come home yet, she looks up the importance of close relationships in early development:

“The attachment bond is the term for the first interactive love relationship—the one had with an individual’s primary caregiver as an infant, usually the mother. This mother-child attachment bond shapes an infant's brain, profoundly influencing their self-esteem, their expectations of others, and their ability to attract and maintain successful adult relationships."

She decides that she's not going to share these facts with him.

An easy promise to make at 9.

By 14, when Jane is back and her dad has apologised a million more times she finds it harder to bite back on that quote she still has memorised. She still can't believe it took him 10 years to tell her about her mother.

It's not that she dislikes Jane.

It's that Jane was able to get him to stay after a few months when Adele had been there the entire time.

She doesn't want to get into a fight with him, because he'll cry, and she hates it when he cries, so she never brings it up. Instead, she asks them to send her to one of the 4 boarding schools she's looked up in the summer between 8th and 9th grade.

"I think it'll really help me focus on my extracurriculars" she explains to her dad and Jane over dinner after she's given a spiel on each of the possible schools "which is going to be important when I look for colleges"

"You have too many extracurriculars. You could probably get into college now if you really wanted to" her dad jokes, but doesn't push it any further.

Later, Jane sits her down and tells her in that gentle, kind way that she has that he just wants to make sure she still has a chance to visit her mother sometimes, that he's worried her moving away will mean she never sees her.

If Adele had a sense of humour about that particular facet of her life, she would have laughed.

...

In the 9th grade between art and music, and living at school and making her way through all the Pulitzer short listed novels for that year she reads Catcher in The Rye and hates it.

...

She goes on exchange to France for a year, spends her vacations at internships, starts internally referring to her dad as Edward and visits her mother in the facility at the beginning and end of every summer.

It's awkward.

They ask her to come in for a family session every now and then and she obliges, but has very little to say, instead just continues to listen as another adult in her life apologises to her through tears.

...

She doesn't talk to her dad. Puberty and distance pretty significantly destroyed any progress they had made since Jane's return all those years ago.

She doesn't talk to him, but at least she sees all of him now.

Every. Single. Dot.

She wishes she still had the twinkle of a smile and a gift bag to remember him by, would have preferred it to this man who is simultaneously overbearing and distant. Who tries to start conversations with her but doesn't follow through, who gets her a set of oil paints for her 18th birthday because Jane tells him what she's interested in. Who doesn’t give her a chance to be mad because he cries every time he apologises to her.

...

Jane hands her a book on Degas, second hand, she chose it because there's a lovely inscription on the first page. A poem that Adele thinks might be Coleridge and is signed with two kisses.

Adele wonders in a sort of detached way if Jane might have been able to write her own inscription on the book but doesn't say anything. Jane tries, that's what's important.

She's only 12-years-older than her, not exactly a big enough age gap for parenting. It's part of the reason she decided to go to boarding school. Having predicted something of a moody angst ridden period in her teen years that she didn't think that anyone really needed to be put through.

It's only in hindsight that she realises her moody period was probably limited to that weekend where she came to terms with how deeply she loathed J. D Salinger.

...

She expects when she does move out for college (Duke, not Harvard) that they'll have a baby. It hardly takes a genius to figure out.

Not that she is a genius, but she has it on good authority that she's very bright.

Jane is young, maternal, Edward probably wants a chance to do it right. To be there for a child like he had wanted to when he was younger.

It's a pretty common misconception, that Adele thinks he had wanted nothing to do with her as a baby. She's not so self pitying that she assumes he was off gallivanting around for the sheer joy of it when she was first born. Both of them spend a lot of time telling her that it wasn't the case and she understands.

He had wanted to be there.

But he wasn’t.

...

Adele’s first few months of college are nice. Nothing amazing to write home about. She doesn’t share her biological parent's previous love of the college social scene but gets along with her roommate well enough. They share an art history class and a deep hatred of Salinger and it’s enough for something of a friendship to form.

She talks about her when she’s home over Christmas break. About her roommate and the library (which according to Edward, she spends far too much time in) and how pretty the campus is.

After dinner, as they sit in the living room, having stacked the plates in the sink and talked some more about college Adele watches as Jane and Edward exchange a nervous glance and tell her they have an announcement.

“Jane is pregnant!”

“You’re going to be a big sister”

She knows how she’s supposed to react, goes to say congratulations with a big excited smile but what comes out instead is “How far along are you? Because unless you’re 12 weeks it’s better not to tell people. The first trimester is when you’re most likely to miscarry”

The pair seem momentarily thrown, but Jane recovers quickly “I’m about 10 weeks, but we wanted to tell you in person”

Adele tries to smile again, feels something drop in her stomach and the flicker of the expression dies on her face. She wants to congratulate them. This is excellent news. They get to be a family and that is very exciting for them. She wants to say as much but instead she finds words she wasn’t even aware she remembered tumbling from her mouth like she’s rehearsed them “Did you know the ‘attachment bond’ is the term for the first interactive love relationship? The one experienced with an individual’s primary caregiver as an infant? It’s usually with the mother. It shapes an infant's brain, profoundly influencing their self-esteem, their expectations of others, and their ability to attract and maintain successful adult relationships"

She hasn’t spoken like that since she was a child and Jane and Edward stare blankly at her for a second, they don’t just look shocked, they look concerned.

“Where did you pick up that?”

“My roommate’s a psych major” she lies around the burning feeling in her stomach and stands “I’m going to start on the dishes”

She’s in the kitchen before she realises she never offered them congratulations.

…

“Adele”

Jane is standing in the doorway of the kitchen. There had been a hushed conversation before hand that she hadn’t been able to quite catch.

“Hey Jane” she plonks a serving dish into the sudsy water turning around to add “sorry I just realised I forgot to say congratulations”

“That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about”

Leaving the serving dish to soak she turns around to face her, placing her hands in her pockets.

“Do you want to tell me what’s bothering you Adele?”

“Nothing’s bothering me”

Jane seems less than convinced, but doesn’t say anything.

“I assumed you two would be trying for a baby a few months ago, you’re young, he wants a chance to actually raise someone”

“He’s not trying to-”

“It’s fine that he does, he wanted to be there when I was a baby but couldn’t so now that he’s married and I’m not living at home it’s fair enough that he’d give it another try, it’s not as if the two of us are close”

Her voice is very steady as she speaks, it’s something she’s mulled over so many times it doesn’t even feel like a series of thoughts anymore. Jane looks at her a little sadly and helps her dry the dishes.

…

The day before she leaves, when she’s flipping through an old book in a bedroom that she barely got to live in, he joins her. As is fairly standard when the pair of them are the only two in the room, the silence is somewhat uncomfortable. He goes to her book shelf and picks up something, her copy of _Franny and Zooey_ , it’s uncanny how he manages to do that.

Her eyes are on the book in his hands but eventually she looks up his face and she recognises the expression, one of well worn guilt. He’s going to apologise again. She sighs before he gets the first word out, closes her eyes, looks down at her feet.

“You don’t have to say you’re sorry” She says, her voice isn’t impatient, or annoyed, or really anything you might associate with a misunderstood teen “I know”

“Why do I always feel like I need to be apologising to you?”

A million things scramble into her mind and she closes her eyes against the expression on his face again. It’s so very downtrodden. She remembers looking at that face crack in despair in a hospital room, and is suddenly very, very angry.

“I don’t know” her eyes open again and she glances to the corner of the doorframe agitated.

“Obviously you do”

“No I don’t”

“What do you _want_ from me?”

He has an odd look of desperation in his eyes, and she remembers watching a video years ago, about how he used to argue with her mother. How difficult it had been for him to figure out how to help. She wonders if this is how he would look at her when she couldn’t get out of bed, or when all she could do was cry. Maybe he just looks at her like this because she resembles her crazy mother more and more as she ages.

“I want you to” most things she says she repeats over and over and over in her head so they come out right, but this is something she doesn’t think about, something she makes her brain avoid “apologise properly”

“I’ve been apologising to you since you were 10 Adele”

He looks so sad as he says it too. Adele feels hopelessness fill up her chest because this is how it always happens. She swallows and stares down at her feet.

“Every time you apologise to me you do it in this way like I can’t possibly be mad at you for how it all turned out, because no matter how many awful things you did, you were suffering first” He seems stunned by her words, and she averts her gaze because she doesn’t want to say what she’s about to say, because she’s repeated to herself so many times that she’s over it, that it’s fine “Which is ridiculous because who am I meant to be mad at? Mom? _Jane?_ She’s probably the only reason you apologised in the first place” Steeling herself she glances up at him to see if he’ll deny it. He’s slack jawed , not looking at her and she lets out her second sigh of the conversation. She feels about a million years old as she finishes with a quiet, precise “I thought so”

Adele leaves him standing in what was very briefly her bedroom. He’s still clutching the book.

…

Jane agrees to drive her to the airport and she must have spoken to him the previous night because when Adele appears at the door with her luggage he’s leaning on the car waiting to speak to her. She pauses for a second, suitcase in hand, before walking around to the back of the car to open the trunk. Jane stays standing by the front door.

“I was wondering if I could drive you”

Adele places her bag in the car and closes the door, exhaling a short breath out of her nose and glancing back at Jane who she doesn’t even have to look at to know that she’s being her usual, lovely, supportive thing from the front door “If you want to”

They reverse out of the driveway in silence.

…

The car ride is mostly silent, Adele regrets not grabbing one of her travel books from her carry on to read for the drive.

By the time they pull in at the airport she’s a little frustrated, and is about to jump out, grab her bag and head straight for the departure lounge when he speaks for the first time.

“I talked to Jane last night”

She pauses, her hand on the door waiting for him to continue. If she’s being honest she doesn’t expect much from him, but hears him out anyway.

“And I made a list” from his pocket he produces a folded piece of note paper. Jane always was a list person, she and Adele have that in common. It’s odd to see it in his hands though. She remembers the first time they went grocery shopping after the house had burned down, he had gone from shelf to shelf grabbing things at random without any sort of plan. He’s not looking at her as he unfolds it and begins to read “I’m sorry that I lied about your mother, and that lying about her destroyed our home”

Adele glances down at her lap and doesn’t say anything, so he continues.

“I’m sorry I only started staying at home after Jane moved in”

He goes on, and on, and on. No excuses, no sobbing, just listing what he’s done wrong by her, things she hadn’t even realised she’s mad about. The fact that she has to go to the family sessions at the clinic with her mom alone, that he spent years not looking at her because he was afraid of her figuring out he was lying, that he only stopped lying initially because he had hoped, in some vague way, that it would bring Jane back. It makes her feel awful, all these things he’s done wrong. Her brain is telling her that he is her dad, dad’s do not treat their children like this.

It takes her a second to realise that she just thought of him as ‘dad’.

It’s a long list, and when he reads the last thing off it (being relieved she had gone away for school because she looked so much like her mother) he presses his lips together, folds the paper up and places it in his pocket.

“There” he says with a nod “No excuses, I’m sorry and I’m going to try to do better”

Her hand is still on the door and she’s staring at the dashboard when she feels his eyes on her. She is desperately telling herself that Jane put him up to the list, the apologies, the words ‘no excuses’. There are things on that list that Jane wouldn’t know about, things that Adele herself is only marginally aware of. She stops arguing.

Her dad has apologised.

Her _dad_ has apologised.

It’s not a lot. She knows that it’s not a lot. Most dads would have done this years ago and a decent apology doesn’t mean she still isn’t angry.

Adele brings her gaze to him, he’s regarding her like he’s not sure if she’s about to pounce, so she shoots him a small smile and he seems to relax a little.

Her hand returns to the door and she opens it, her eyes still on him.

“Thanks for the ride dad”


End file.
